


In the Walls

by Minx_DeLovely



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25954054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minx_DeLovely/pseuds/Minx_DeLovely
Summary: The police had already gone through her apartment looking for explosives. They found a network of cameras and unearthed some faulty electrical wiring that would have eventually reduced the building to a cinder, but no explosives. He couldn’t accept that, even though they’d sent the dogs through.She knew why—in his mind, all the pain of her confession of love could not have been for nothing. In her mind, she knew that of course it could—as it always had.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 14
Kudos: 97





	In the Walls

Molly set out the mugs for tea. For a moment she thought of putting out the “good” china, but there was so little of it left and she thought it might send too pointed a message. He already knew he was special—he knew it too well, in fact. As she cut a lemon into wedges with the clever ceramic knife she’d treated herself to after a particularly grim day at the morgue, she heard loud thumping coming from inside the wall. Startled, her hand slipped and she dropped the knife. It landed on the floor and snapped in half. 

She couldn’t stifle her irritated scream. At least there was no blood this time. Her instinct about the good china was right—Sherlock made her too clumsy. Although, it would have been funny to see him try to hold onto the slim, gold handle with his enormous hands.

“Are you still all right in there?” she shouted.

The thumping got louder and he shouted in a muffled voice. “It’s only a matter of time!”

“Right, right, right—” She muttered under her breath as she swept up the remnants of her knife. The police had already gone through her apartment looking for explosives. They found a network of cameras and unearthed some faulty electrical wiring that would have eventually reduced the building to a cinder, but no explosives. He couldn’t accept that, even though they’d sent the dogs through. She knew why—in his mind, all the pain of her confession of love could not have been for nothing. In her mind, she knew that of course it could—as it always had. She threw the shards of her knife in the trash. 

Indulging in self-pity wasn’t going to help her feel any better. She’d indulged in enough of that already. 

The first time they met she’d been so taken with him, unable to even breath when he entered the room with his swirling, dark coat, making chaotic and brilliant observations. He seemed like a summer storm come to life. She’d introduced herself, hand jutted out because she’d been so, so eager to touch his skin. He hadn’t taken it, and his cold, light eyes flicked over her.

“Molly? Thirty, unmarried, no children, no pets. You get so wrapped up in your work you’ve forgotten to eat that honey and marmalade sandwich that’s melting in your pocket. With that sweet tooth I’d say you’d better get a move on before it catches up with you, but no living man will ever be as compelling as the dead ones with which you surround yourself.”

Her face had crumpled and she’d held back tears. He saw it—what he’d done to her—and instead of expressing some sort of apology, he’d turned on his heel and walked away. She’d cried in the bathroom and had been determined to hate him, except the next day he’d stopped by her desk with a beautifully wrapped jar of honey. He’d been circumspect when he set it on her desk—not brash or cruel. He’d almost seemed a child.

“You’ll find, this is very much the way I am.” He’d said, throwing in a lot of extra words that didn’t mean anything when an “I’m sorry,” would have done the job. That was his way—withholding explanations and words to stoke anticipation or giving you too many of the wrong ones to accomplish the same thing. He was irritating, but she’d fallen into his orbit and had grown to forgive so much. Great men were supposed to be thoughtless. Sadly, small ones were, too. He was the only one who’d ever managed to be more interesting alive than dead. 

“Ah ha!” Sherlock shouted from somewhere in the duct work. Then he swore, which she’d never heard him do before. 

By the time he emerged from her crawlspace, covered in dust, she’d finished baking a loaf of bread which lay cooling on the counter. He came into her kitchen looking diminished without his coat. Cobwebs and chalky white plaster dirtied his black hair. He didn’t seem to notice he was mucking up her linoleum.

“Were you aware there is a German shu-mine in the back of your closet?” He asked.

“Yeah. My grandfather was a sapper in the War. After he took the bomb part out, he turned the wooden case into a music box for my grandmother.”

“There’s a morbid streak running through the Hooper clan.” He smiled warmly at her. Before he met John, his smiles had always been too sharp. 

“Grandfather wanted to make something beautiful with the tragedy he’d been handed, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t here the last time.”

“She passed away a little while ago. My mother just finished going through her things and sent me some keepsakes last week.”

“I’m sorry,” he put his dusty hand on her shoulder. Molly knew this was progress for him and it made her smile despite herself.

“Thank you.” She put her hand over his for a moment. He looked at her face and really gave his attention over to her, not looking past like he sometimes did. Unwillingly, she felt grateful for the small gesture. As soon as the realization formed, she felt disgusted with herself, and snapped back to business. Molly's smile reduced to one of politeness and she subtly moved away from his touch. 

“Clean yourself up and then we’ll have something to eat. I’ll lay fresh clothes out.”

He kept a black overnight bag under her bed, for times when he needed to make an escape, so he had a change of clothes. She’d send his trousers and shirt out to the cleaner and pick them up again, like she always did when he made a mess of himself at her flat. They would be ready the next time he came over to play out this strange ritual. Just once she wished he’d come over for a proper visit without feeling the need to pull off her wainscoting to search for phantom explosives.

He untucked his shirt and began unbuttoning it as he walked back to the bathroom. She turned around, flustered.

***

Sherlock walked through Molly’s bedroom shedding filthy clothes as he went. She’d decorated the small room with charcoal drawings of skeletons and musculature in sherbet pink frames. The wallpaper was green and pink. Her narrow bed was piled with pillows, some white with red pom poms, others mint green with white skulls in neat rows. The whole effect was that of a spring garden decorated with corpses. This was Molly Hooper in a glance.

She always came across as ordinary, but of course she never had been. Truly clever people didn’t need to announce it to the room and she was truly clever in ways he could never be. He was terrific with a façade, as perfect at it as she was dreadful, but when it came to reading a human heart, no one was better. He didn’t mean that in the sentimental way—she was an exceptional forensic pathologist. Despite his years of study, she could look at a body and get to the conclusion faster and more accurately than he ever could. That’s why he’d tried to stay in her good graces at first. She’d been his secret pearl amid the swine. 

He took off his socks at her bathroom door, leaving a trail of clothes that she would gather up once she heard the water running. Breadcrumbs instead of the feast. He turned on her taps and tested the water with his fingers before stepping inside the shower stall. The warm water felt good after crawling around insulation. She had an array of bath products all scented with lemon and lavender. Lemon for innocence and lavender for constancy. She hadn’t chosen them for that reason, but to stop the scent of cadavers from clinging to her skin. 

He scrubbed himself with the lavender soap, then he washed the cobwebs from his hair with her lemon shampoo. There were no explosives hidden in her building, but sometimes the compulsion to check would wake him up in the middle of the night. He’d stare at blueprints of her neighborhood, seeking out forgotten pockets underground that may have been built over through the years. There wasn’t anything. There wouldn’t ever be—but that would not stop him from looking.

She would acquiesce to these mad visits with grace and patience. Those were two other attributes assigned to the lavender flower. She could wander through her life perfectly unaware of these associations or how they moved her hand, but he could not. They hadn’t spoken about it—the desperate phone call, or the forced confession. Why would they? It would only hurt her more. Just like the photo of her Moriarty had sent to him when he’d been pretending to date Molly. She’d been topless, hand reaching out to cover the camera, mid-laugh. It wasn’t calculated or posed, just terribly, horribly intimate. And the text afterward—She likes a spanking. No surprise there. Does. Not. Like. Choking. Will bite when cornered.

He’d saved it, the picture and the text, for further analysis, but found every time he tried to look at it his vision would go red. He’d ended up shooting the phone, which was stupid. He hadn’t liked that he could get angry that way. Molly had always been his to take for granted or take apart. He’d never thought of her taking off her shirt. Now that he was forced to think of her that way, it seemed as though it would be a messy disaster. Sweet and sticky and all over the place—a melting marmalade and honey sandwich.

Irene had been clean lines of demarcation, a professional experience. He’d admired here more than he’d loved her. She was an ideal come to life. They were both more than people and somehow that had made what they did together much less human. But Molly was of this world. Her hands were submerged in blood, and viscera. She was life and death. 

He shut off the faucets, making the water stop. For a moment he stood there and shivered, before grabbing one of her bright, yellow towels to dry off. He got out of the shower stall and opened the door to her bedroom. She’d set out his emergency clothes on the bed and folded up the scattered pieces he’d left on her floor. Those she’d placed neatly into a plastic bag that she’d set next to her hamper.  
He dressed in a hurry. When he came out of the bedroom, she sat waiting at her table. The bread had been sliced into thick, warm pieces. She’d set up a platter of lunch meat and pickles. It reminded him of the time his nanny had taken him to her mother’s apartment for an afternoon. He’d been shocked how small her rooms had been. He’d loved it, though, because she’d let him watch television, eat sweets and play with her dog. His parents hadn’t owned a television and made him adhere to a strict diet because of Mycroft’s weight problem, and of course, he’d lately realized, they never had a dog.  
Molly smiled up at him, but it was a tight-lipped smile that hid her teeth. Her hands shook as she poured the tea.

“You don’t have to stay.”

“Why, you have someone coming over?”

“Nothing like that.” She set the teapot down. “I mean I’m safe. There’s nothing lurking in the walls.”

He picked up the bread to make himself a sandwich, while she spread jam on her toast. Today it was blackberry. He watched her fingers manipulating the knife and the white bread covered in deep, deep purple. Some jam landed on her thumb. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked it off. 

“What happened that day?” he asked.

“Which day?” She began fiddling with one of the tassels on the edge of her napkin.

“The day Euros made me call you. You said you’d been having a bad day, what happened?”

“My grandmother—that was the day she died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You said that before.”

Momentarily his anger flared, because he’d said the correct thing and it had upset her anyway. Then he remembered there was no right thing, not when dealing with regular people.

“Do we have to speak about that day?” she asked.

“Lavender is for silence,” he said, more to himself than to her. This whole matter of comforting her seemed impossible, especially since he was the cause of her disquiet. 

“Is that some kind of code?”

“No, just an observation.” 

Perfumes intended to evoke different moods, a cultural subtext drifting through the air. The reason why some women turned your head and others reminded you of your primary school teacher. Scent could call up the strongest memories, the most intense. He didn’t want to tell all this to Molly because it meant nothing, just a bunch of old tricks he’d used before to keep from really talking.

“I meant it.” It took all his courage to get out those words and then he realized she had no idea what he was trying to say. The only conversation they should be having was the one he couldn’t bear to start, so he’d dived into the middle. He rushed past her baffled expression and began again. “When I told you that I loved you. I meant it.”

She covered her mouth with her hand, and her eyes got wet. “Why are you telling me this? I know you don’t want to be with me, or you’d have said it first.”

“You’re ordinary, Molly—”

“Get out—”

“No, I mean the way John is ordinary.” 

That stopped her in her tracks and she was willing to listen again. He continued.

“John wants real things, just like you. I can’t be close in the normal way. I am trying to learn how, but it’s difficult.”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life waiting for you.”

“I know that, Molly. That’s why I’m nothing but sorry.”

She pursed her lips and a tear slid down her cheek. He knew better than to speak at that moment. A shattered pitcher couldn’t hold any water and there were no more words to say.  
When he’d kissed her before it was in a conciliatory way, as one would kiss the cheek of a child with a bruised knee. He thought of what it would be like to give himself over in earnest and kiss her mouth. She would taste like blackberry jam—so sweet it would burn. In his imagination, they went further. He could picture her on top of him with her long, hair covering his face. If he gave himself over to it, her sleight weight would pin him to the earth forever. He’d never be able to float above the concerns of the world again.  
Molly cleared her throat. She shook out her cloth napkin before placing it on her lap. Then she dashed the tears from her eyes.

“I think John said you were having trouble with a case. The decomposition was too progressed?”

“Yes, that’s right.” He looked down at his plate and realized he should busy himself with eating a sandwich, even though he could no longer stomach a bite. She had dismissed the topic of love in favor of something with which they were both more comfortable.

They finished lunch without speaking another word about his uselessness, or her broken heart. Instead they talked about decomposition and the way blood tended to look after congealing for just one hour as opposed to a whole day. She cleared the plates, and that was his cue to find his coat. It was lying on her bed. Pulling on the sleeve, he saw her standing in the doorway, a broken half smile on her face. She watched him as he buttoned his coat.

“You never look quite right without it,” she said.

She walked him to the door. He thought of enfolding her in his arms, kissing her in a proper goodbye. Instead he looked away.

“I’ll be round next Saturday to check the walls.”

“Sherlock—” She sounded exhausted.

He held up his hand.

“Euros is still alive and she knows all about you. It would be idiotic to leave anything to chance.”

“And if I told you no more poking around in my air ducts, would you still come round?”

“Of course I would, Molly. But I would probably tear out your bedroom carpet when you were out of the room. It’s not even a choice anymore.”

She laughed softly, before she opened the door for him. “I’ll see you next week.”


End file.
